Reflections on Chris Henry from the locker room

Dec. 17, 2009

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All I knew of him personally is what stood in front of me on Monday and Wednesday mornings in the Bengals locker room, where it was and is my job to talk to the players and afterward write short stories.

I saw a tall, lean, quiet, kid who wanted to get better as a football player and was doing all the right things to make it happen.

At a press conference Thursday morning at Paul Brown Stadium, Bengals team owner Mike Brown described the same feelings he had received from talking with Henry alone at a Christmas party several years ago.

"Gentle,” “soft-spoken,” “pleasant" were the words Brown used todescribe Henry.

That’s the Henry I knew from our locker room chats. There was more to him than that, of course. There was a side hardly anybody knew. It was the side of him that made him jump into the bed of that pickup truck that his fiancée was pulling away in Wednesday, following a domestic squabble between the two of them.

It was a decision that ultimately cost him his life. And that was the part of him that maybe nobody will ever know.

He was still a kid.

I don’t like it when I hear college basketball coaches refer to their players as “kids.”

But, clearly, some of them are still kids -- if the message there is that they are still learning.

That’s what I saw in Henry. But the only attitude I saw was a good one.

He was saying all the right things this year, and on the field, he was doing all the right things.

As long as he was a contributing member of this team, I didn’t expect something terrible to happen to him.

And as long as he stayed a contributing member of this team, I believed he had a good chance of turning his life around.

With one key proviso.

I felt strongly that he needed to find a sustaining support system away from the field and locker room. He needed to have a good life away from the game.

I thought he had finally found that life with his fiancée, Loleini Tonga. They were planning to get married in March.

I knew well the story of Henry’s checkered past. It included his being arrested 3½ years ago for providing alcohol to three underage girls in a Covington hotel room.

Of all the things Henry did, I considered that the most heinous, because it involved real kids.

I didn’t give Henry the benefit of the doubt on that one.

But I was curious to see where his life would go from there.

Even when he got hurt in a Bengals game midway through this season, I felt his family outside football would sustain him.

I didn’t expect him to wind up in a domestic squabble Wednesday that, according to a police report, turned so serious that it escalated into him jumping into the bed of that pickup truck, being thrown from it and ending up on life support.

Before I began covering the Bengals, I believed Henry was an impediment to the “team” concept, and that it probably would take a miracle to save him from himself.

He had served an eight-game disciplinary suspension a year after the incident in Covington.

But he appeared to be turning his life around after that suspension.

Then, a year ago last April, he was released by the Bengals following his fifth arrest in 28 months. Most everybody, including me, figured he was history.

But four months later, the Bengals re-signed him because the team owner appreciated Henry’s unique talents and understood his irreplaceable value to the team’s passing game and felt the kid was salvageable as a human being and decided to give him yet another chance.

At the time, I recall thinking, “Good for you, Mike Brown,” even though it appeared that almost everybody else in town was against bringing Henry back. They felt Brown had undercut his head coach, Marvin Lewis, and was sending the wrong message to the team and community at large.

Especially to the community that works with real kids. Some of those caregivers are real professionals; some of us are parents. Almost all of us have problems if we’re raising kids.

So, yes, I get all that.

But I just felt it had a chance to work if the right people came along.

I thought they had.

But I also knew that all bets might be off if his connection to his football family was broken.

I just didn’t know if Henry was ready to make tough, good, decisions on his own. Because even with a good fiancée, a good wife, a good family, it’s not all about them.

Sometimes it’s about you.

I have no idea what was in Henry’s mind when he made that decision to jump into the bed of that pickup.

But it was a horrible decision.

Before Henry broke his arm this year, I’d had several brief, but engaging, locker room talks with him about his hopes for his life, on the field and off.

Sometimes I quoted him on the football stuff, sometimes I didn’t. I just enjoyed his easy demeanor.

I’m saying this now, not because he’s dead. I’m saying it now because I liked the guy. He was sincere. I can tell you that. His teammates felt the same way about him.

They liked the dude; they rooted for him. They wanted him to beat his demons.

But one of those demons got him Wednesday afternoon. And the saddest thing of all is that this time he didn’t get another chance.